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This depicts a group of cottages at Neunen in Brabant. The cottages are similar to a group that appear in an oil painting known as 'Village at Sunset'. Van Gogh mentioned this and two other drawings in a letter to a friend, the painter van Rappard, as an example of his recent work. Of one of them, he said, 'I had to do it roughly and quickly for the time was rather short for catching the right effect of light and shade, and the tone of the scene, and Nature as it was at that very moment.' The wintry scene of this drawing relates it to a similar drawing described to van Rappard in a letter of March 1884.

Van Gogh mentioned this drawing in a letter to his friend the painter van Rappard (R45) of May 1884 as 'Thatched Roofs': it was one of three pen and ink drawings which he was sending as examples of his recent work. The other drawings sent at the same time seem to have been 'Little Ditch' (F.1243), which resembles this in having a dark framing border in ink, and 'Pines in the Fen' (F.1249). After saying that he would have preferred the pen strokes in these drawings to follow the lines of the forms and to have strengthened the tones of the masses, he added: 'I had to do it roughly and quickly for the time was rather short for catching the right effect of light and shade, and the tone of the scene, and Nature as it was at that very moment.' The Tate's drawing was probably executed two months earlier as it closely resembles a pen and ink sketch, apparently of the same site, in another letter to van Rappard (R42) written in March. Also the scene is still wintry.

A very similar group of cottages appears in the oil painting F.190, known as 'Village at Sunset'.

Published in:Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.290-1, reproduced p.290